


Predestination

by 00qverlord



Series: 1 AM Pepsi induced writing extravaganzas. [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Are you ready for my 1 am pepsi induced writing extravaganza, F/M, Parallel Universes, Rebirth, Romance, Short Story, dying and coming back to life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-20
Packaged: 2018-09-01 01:21:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8601628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/00qverlord/pseuds/00qverlord
Summary: Astra Morgan is pretty sure she's dead. Then why did she wake up in the middle of a run down New York apartment?





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is a short story I had to work on for a writing class. I was supposed to bring it in 2 weeks ago, but I was away one week and I made up and excuse for the other. Truth is, I haven't done it. But here we go, saturday night at 1:00 I am I am finally done thanks to pepsi and sheer determination to get this done by Sunday afternoon.

     Astra Morgan knew something was up when her brother Mike passed her the red umbrella. The Michael Morgan she knew lived in residency halfway across the state. Last time she checked, he hadn't come home yet. She thanked him without a second thought and went out the door, but the scenario played over and over in her head. It was entirely plausible Mike had come home while she was sleeping. Yeah, that had to be it. Astra opened the umbrella and walked down the street on her way to high school.   
     She had just entered the school yard when her boyfriend, Dean Cavanagh, spotted her and met her with a huge grin.  
     "Hey babe," He greeted Astra with a kiss on the cheek, when one of his friends called to get his attention.  
     "Ben! Over here man, we got somethin' for you!" There was a group of boys standing around something, but Astra was frozen to her spot. Ben? She thought back to seeing Mike this morning, and she wasn't so sure it was just a happy coincidence. Either she went to the wrong school and kissed Dean's doppleganger, or something was seriously wrong. The school bell rung like a bomb exploding and it yanked Astra back to the reality of the situation.   
     Amongst the other things that had changed, her classes certainly hadn't. Everything was inexplicably dull, as per usual. When the bell rung at the end of the day, she avoided everyone she knew in an attempt to get home faster. She saw her best friend Anna trying to reach her through the crowd of New York teenagers, but Astra just turned her head and walked slightly faster. She didn't know what she was going to do about this. It wasn't like it was Google-able. 'I woke up and suddenly everything is different.' She was probably going to get a bunch of baloney about witchcraft. She believed in science, cold hard facts, and things she could prove.

     Astra hadn't realized she walked all the way home until she was facing the pale yellow of her front door. Astra's house wasn't particularly large or gorgeous, but it was home. A semi-detached two blocks from her school wasn't so bad. Mike wasn't home when she was. Neither were her mom or dad, but Gage the pug greeted her happily at the door. She laughed, and bent down to pet him. Astra went to her room and dropped her bag on the floor, booting up her laptop. The home screen default was Bing, which raised another red flag for her. Since she had the laptop, Google was her search engine, she found Bing quite incompetent. She rubbed at her eyes and scratched at her head. She sighed, and decided to go get a bowl of cereal. Maybe, that would help calm her down. Thankfully, unlike a lot of things in her day, the brown sugar Mini Wheats were in perfect condition. She knew she had homework to do, but after Astra finished her cereal, she felt like a sloth, and her bed was looking like the only place she wanted to be right now. She didn't bother changing, but she slid out of her shirt and pants, tucked herself under the covers and went off to sleep.   
     Astra had the weirdest dream. There was a lot of people yelling her name, and she thought the small shock felt like what a defibrillator might feel like if she ever had to use one. There was a lot of bright lights, but no pain. Pain was bad, pain meant that this was a nightmare. There was no pain, and Astra was grateful. 

     When astra woke up, she wasn't in her bed. It wasn't her room either. It was run down, the paint was peeling, and behind that was rotting wood and drywall. There was a vague smell of something burning that wasn't close enough to cause suspicion, but enough to bother Astra. The sounds were new. She lived in a remote suburb outside New York, but aside from the fact that she now heard planes, helicopters, trains, and streetcars, she also heard people. She looked out the window, and there were hundreds of people walking around, there were street vendors yelling about hot dogs, and the traffic was jammed like nothing she'd ever seen. She wandered out of the room, but there was no one there. Not family, friends, or even strangers.  
     The house was bare and stripped of furniture, making it seem devoid of life entirely and decomposing. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes, trying to compose herself. The last thing she remembered, she was coming home from staying out late with Anna, and Dean had called to talk with her before she fell asleep. She opened her eyes, having a mild moment of panic wondering where her phone was, and if anyone she knew had a clue as to what was going on. She calmed once she found her phone, but a sharp panic spread through her chest when she opened the phone, and the screen was a holographic projection that spanned from the screen. The closed the phone, because there was honestly no point in figuring that out right now, she had to figure out what she was doing here. 

     Astra found what resembled a library, but there were no books anywhere. It was just tablets stored in a library-like formation, as it turned out. They were all books, but they were electronics. She picked up one that was displaying the local newspaper, and checked the date, which read the day before yesterday. She nearly dropped the tablet and swore, cause people around her to look up. She went to one of the desktops, and went onto the search engine, which was something called IRIS, a program she didn't recognize but hoped it worked anyway. It turned out, IRIS worked perfectly. Astra searched every possible piece of information she could get on the parallel universe theory. There wasn't much on it, just that it was theoretically a thing that could exist, but nothing was proven. Astra sighed and closed the tablet. She wandered outside into the putrid smell of old hot dogs and burning air. She might as well look around while she had the chance. 

     Every time Astra woke up, she only remembered falling asleep. She had weird flashbacks to odd situations that didn't really make sense or correspond to where she currently was. She would get visions of a purple sky, or flying cars, or where the remaining bits of human society lived in an underwater city. They all sounded like things out of a sci-fi novel, and Astra couldn't even be sure whether they were real, or whether it was just her brain playing tricks on her. It wasn't until one day when Astra was walking along what used to be her street, but was now overrun with people, street performers, and vendors. She bumped into a guy, and she immediately recoiled.  
     "Oh, I'm so sorry, I didn't see you there." The man had been carrying a messenger bag stocked full of papers, some of which had flown out from his bag when she bumped into him.  
     "No, it's quite alright, I'm sorry I didn't watch where I was going more carefully," Astra apologised. She bent down to grab the loose pages and hand them back to the man, when she saw what was on them. The art was incredible. It wasn't anything specific, just people walking around a park and being themselves. The finite detail was impossible to look away from. But she only got a passing glance as she handed it back to him, and he hastily stuffed it in his bag.   
     "I'm Astra, Astra Morgan," she offered her hand to the man who looked up, slightly surprised.   
     "My name's Adam Trelan." The man seemed to have an awkward stance about him, but not in a bad way. More like he was used to being alone in a room with his art instead of talking to random girls on the street.   
     The two's conversation didn't stop there. They walked around some more, since Adam was just coming home from finishing a freelance job, and Astra had nowhere intentional to go anyway. Astra came to like Adam, his favourite colour was blue even though he tended to draw in pencil, and his family was from Germany even though he'd lived in America his whole life. He dreamed of going to Germany someday. In exchange, Astra told him things about herself, how her brother Mike was off to college, but she wanted him to come home soon, and how she used to play soccer as a kid, but still really enjoyed it.   
     At the end of the day when they parted ways for home, it was the first time in a while that Astra felt happy and satisfied. 

     Astra woke to a dull throbbing in her arm, and when she opened her eyes, she realized she had been sleeping on it so that it was bent at a weird angle. She shook it out, but could already feel the start of pins and needles. As she shook her arm, something caught her eye and she stopped shaking her arm to get a better look at it. In a smooth black cursive on her arm, the name _Adam Trelan_ was displayed. She took a deep breath to try and calm herself, because words don't just _appear_ on your arm one day. But that told her, she knew then that she had to find him, she had to find Adam. The weird art guy who she bumped into on a street corner.   
     Everything came back, flooding to her in a rush like a tsunami. All the different universes she'd been to and everything she'd experienced. She put on some clothes and shoes, and flung herself out the door. She woke in the same place as before, so she made her way to the cafe that Adam and her had stayed and talked at last time they met.   
     As she had thought, there he was, sitting at a booth, a laptop in front of all the papers on the table which Adam sat behind. Astra grinned and grabbed the extra chair across from Adam, causing him to look up.   
     His eyes widened, and he coughed in surprise, "Astra? What are you doing here?"   
     She looked him dead in the eye and held up her arm, and his eyes drifted to the words on her arm. His eyes drifted back to Astra's, as he raised his arm. Astra's gaze snapped to Adam's arm, which contained to words, to her fear and joy.   
 _Astra Morgan._


End file.
